On New Jobs

I am now in the business of selling clothing. Before yesterday, I’d never spent four hours carefully applying Final Sale stickers to heavy woolen pants and white knitted sweaters reduced to $9.88. Crashing through new barriers left and right.

This, I find exciting for two reasons: first, because Change is Good (although it’s a little scary when women come charging up to you asking if you have shorts in this size or that size, because once you have a Final Sticker dispenser in your hand, you carry a certain gravitas), and secondly, because it’s so easy to look at the clothing and think of all of the possibilities. If I owned a pair of white linen pants and a white-and-blue striped sailor-type top–man, the places I’d go with that. If I had that outfit, I’d be the kind of women who can wear big, floppy sun hats and look fashionable instead of goofy. If I had that A-line skirt, then I’d also be the type of woman who can paint my own toenails without my feet looking like a painting by a kindergartener.

And yesterday? At the gym? I saw a man whose face looked exactly like this: